When I was in the ninth grade in Austin, Texas, I got it into my head that I wanted to join my high school football team – by which I mean American football and not the sport that most of the rest of the world calls football and the United States calls soccer.
It was not that I had any sort of talent for or even understanding of the game; I was simply irritated that only boys were permitted to play.
The team coach laughed at my proposal and told me I was not physically strong enough, and I became a cheerleader instead.
Jump ahead a few decades to the world of international football – yes, what the world calls football – and the US Women’s National Team (USWNT) has been rather more successful in combating gender discrimination in sport.
The favourites to win the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup currently under way in Australia and New Zealand, the USWNT made headlines last year when the US Soccer Federation agreed to pay both the women’s and men’s national teams equally and to award the women’s team $22m in back pay. The Federation also announced the “equalisation” of World Cup prize money.
Despite consistently outperforming their male counterparts, the female players had been earning considerably less money – business as usual in a country that forever flaunts itself as a bastion of equality and other noble virtues. According to the Washington, DC-based Economic Policy Institute, the gender pay gap in the US widened from 20.3 percent in 2019 to 22.2 percent in 2022. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.